One of the major talking points with EVs is that 'oil is going to run out' or, in the US, 'blah-blah-blah foreign oil'. Basically, gasoline is evil, it won't be around much longer, and society has a moral obligation to use less.
What I can't grasp is that the materials used to make these batteries and motors do not grow on trees. What's to say these will not run out? What will the unintended consequences be?
The vast majority of minerals like lithium used in batteries haven't been mined yet.
What's more, unlike oil, lithium can be recycled. When a lithium battery has outlived it's useful life you can take the lithium, witchcraft happens and it can be used in a new battery. Not possible with gasoline.
What's also not possible with gasoline is any capacity to manufacture it synthetically on a level great enough to meet global demand. In fact, can it be synthetically manufactured at all? I know you can get synth oil but then that's a lubricant, not a fuel.
In contrast, people are continually refining and developing battery tech. Not just improving the ones we already have and extracting more power and more miles from them (as the same is happening in regular cars too) but coming up with entirely new batteries, carbon nanotechnology and the like.
The ICE will only ever be "refined". I don't want to pull a famous last words trick here and say that there will be no more great advances in internal combustion, but essentially the concept of an ICE will remain the same now until the day the last drop of oil has been used.
Then you have the tailpipe emissions thing. EVs have none, regardless of where they get their electricity. ICE cars do. And even when you take in the full dust-to-dust cycle of an EV, you're still looking at an equivalent of no more than 40g/km of CO2, which no current car gets anywhere near even on tailpipe emissions alone - once you do their dust-to-dust cycle, the CO2 figure goes through the roof.
And it's not just CO2 remember. A lot more comes out the back of a car than carbon dioxide, even in modern and significantly cleaner cars than they used to be.
I see lots of risk here. If 4 out of 10 people switched to battery powered cars, what would happen to the prices of the raw materials used to make the batteries? Supply meet demand...
You're right, though 4/10 is still a long, long way away. I seem to remember hearing that only 1% of the current car market is even hybrids, let alone full EVs.
On another front, with all the CO2 hoopla, what about the price risk to electricity? The US gov't is in no rush to go nuke or build anything to modernize the grid - will the larger demand for electricity increase prices to the point that gas is cheaper?
There's no rush at the moment because the best estimates are that the grid can cope with room to spare. No need to build any more just yet (although of course, there are doubters.
I even wrote about this myself a few months back).
Increased cost in raw materials (batteries) and increased cost in cost electricity doesn't sound like utopia to me. If it's a niche product, no big deal. But if these contraptions take off, any economies of scale will probably we wiped out by a jump in price for raw materials.
Again, it'll be a long time before we reach that point, and that gives a great many people a great many years to build contingency into the tech. We're past the point of contingency in internal combustion now - we're already hooked on a finite resource with no alternative.
And that charger thing;
Quick chargers require 220v in the US. Good ****ing luck trying to get your home owner's association to sign off on that. And for those who live in apartments and condos; will lots & parking gargages look like a jump-rope convention? Will people charge their EV outside even though it's raining? What about snow/ice? I doubt it.
Again, is it not too much to assume that you'd do your sums beforehand and decide whether an EV would meet your needs rather than turning up at your twentieth-storey apartment one day with a Nissan Leaf and thinking "Damn, I should have bought more extension cables..."?
rush hour traffic & daily commutes; miles really don't mean a thing - time does. While you're stuck in traffic, you're running all the accessories. If you have to brave a 2hr commute each way, will you get 40 miles per charge? Hell no. Time is key - not distance.
I understand this, but since accessories use significantly less power than the motor driving the car, the amount of power they use in proportion is much less. Even, for arguements sake, if you average 50mph on your commute that's still two hours of driving in a Nissan Leaf. At 5mph, even with all your accessories going, you're still going to have several hours battery there to play with even once you get moving again.
People want to avoid bad traffic jams & congestion, not paying a few bucks at a pump. These people usually take some form of public transport to avoid congestion, outrageous parking rates, and actually get to work somewhat on time. So what's the point of an EV in the US?
What's the point of
any car in that case, if you've got all that great public transport or high parking rates?
An EV is just another car, and can be used in many of the situations that any other regular car can be used in. If that's your daily commute, then it's arguably
better than a regular car unless you commute vast distances.
I don't really know the answer to that question. It's not to save money as that car is not cheap. It's not to commute to the city as there are better ways. Is it to save oil? Is it to save the careers of politicians? Seems like the latter.
I answered the commuting point above. Saying that "other ways" are better for commuting misses the point of having a car in the first place. For many people, public transport just isn't good enough, isn't convenient enough or simply doesn't suit their lifestyle. In which case if you're simply commuting, then an EV is more than up to the task.
Saving money? Again, it depends on where the savings are. A Volt is expensive, I'm not debating that. A Leaf? Well, if you can make use of all the discounts you can get one cheaper than a Prius.
If you're really clever you can get one for just over $12k. I'd start calling EVs cheap at that point.
And that's before the "early adopter" thing wears off and economies of scale allow EV prices to come down naturally.
There are piston engine designs out there that are or could be ridiculously efficient. Mazda is touting a new DI engine with 14:1 compression that gets 40 (50? I can't remember right now) MPG. That kind of efficiency is where OEMs should be going. I've also posted a link to the Crower 6-stroke engine, which has a host of possibilities and is ridiculously simple and efficient. Diesels have come a long way since the black-smoke-machines of the late 70's and advances in lubrication, drivetrain, and tires are incredible since the malaise era.
ICEs are getting better no doubt about it, but as I said above - there's a limit. At the moment, we're essentially scratching the surface of battery tech, and electric motors are already something like 90% efficient compared to the average ICE efficiency of only
20% or so. The most efficient ICE in the world is still only something like 50% efficient. That's a
massive amount being lost to noise, heat etc.
So why batteries? B/C the politicians say so. I don't trust the politicians nor do I think batteries are the solution to any problem, do you? The link between politics and automobiles is undeniable and it's usually not in the best interest of 'the people' but the career of said politicians.
I don't trust politicians either but nor am I a tin-foil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist.
Battery tech still has some way to go but even despite that the practical aspects of EVs are way ahead of ICE vehicles
If batteries were a winner, there wouldn't be a need for the subsidies or all the new laws regarding fleet MPGs, EV credits, etc, etc, etc.
The subsidies etc are simply because the technology is underdeveloped and at the moment, very expensive.
You could have the best EV in the world but if it cost $1,000,000 then Joe Public wouldn't buy it. Likewise, if your EV did 300 miles on a charge and had decent performance and even cost a reasonable amount but crumpled in a crash and had absolutely no creature comforts, then Joe Public wouldn't put their money into it either.
In order to find a compromise and produce EVs that are competitive with ICE cars, companies currently have to spend a fair amount of money, so to ensure this money is being used to good effect, subsidies allow Joe Public to buy them in great enough numbers that profits can be made, and if profits can be made then production can increase, economies of scale rises, price comes down, people buy more of them etc.
Far from EVs being subsidised because they're rubbish and nobody would buy them otherwise, they're being subsidised because they're
good and manufacturers need people to know this.
.
