Electric cars

gzoom

The 'affordable' 200 miles range+ EVs are literally around the corner. The next generation Nissan Leaf is due to be shown off this September, and Tesla will be 'delivering' the first Model 3 to US customers in the next 5 days.

200 miles of real life range, sub 6 second 0-60 time, same price as a BMW 320D.

https://jalopnik.com/heres-a-closer-look-at-the-production-tesla-model-3-1797154836

EV rapid charging is also developing very quickly. This is the map of the UK where Tesla have installed/about to install their rapid chargers.



These rapid chargers add range at a stupid rate, 300 miles + in hour, which actually means in a 15-30 minute stop for a toilet/coffee your add 150miles of range or another 2hrs+ of driving. This isn't some kind of future/concept tech either, even in somewhere as normal as Northampton services there are 6 of these chargers. Rumours are the actual chargers can run at 140KW+ so in theory add 200 miles+ range in less than 30 minutes but local gird/current battery tech is the limiting factor.

I've done 20K miles in various EVs now in 2.5 years, EVs for me anyways aren't the future, they are already the present, and as prices fall more and more people will have access to the tech and the rate of EV adoption will only head in one direction .

Jackmydad

Never mind about where the cars are going to have their batteries charged, I'm wondering what they're going to have their batteries charged with.
Things get a bit tight already sometimes as far as power availability goes. Think of a cold, still, Winter evening. Everyone comes home at 18:00. "Start's their house up" and plugs the car in to charge.
Where's all that 'leccy coming from. Nuclear? Oh hang on we're not too keen on that, so we haven't built as many new ones as we should have. Coal? We shut most of them down. nasty dirty things! Wind? Er no sorry there's not much wind tonight. Solar. Well it is dark now. . .
Oil then! That's it! We'll generate the power needed to charge all the car batteries with oil fired power stations. We'll ignore the fact that's just moving the "carbon bulls. . . sorry, footprint" around shall we?

To say nothing of the infrastructure: switchgear, transformers, cables, which will need upgrading if (when?) there is a mass takeup of EVs.

As far as self driving cars and non-ownership goes, it would be marvellous. But somebody will make themselves disgustingly rich off it by persuading the government that it needs to be done in some convoluted way.

Martyn1981

Apodemus wrote: »

Sadly, I think that the scenario where costs fall sharply is as realistic as earlier optimism that "electricity will be too cheap to meter" and "the NHS will ensure that people are so healthy that after a few years we won't need so many doctors and nurses".

Half my brain thinks the scenario set out by Tony Seba is crazy, but the other half can't find fault.

I know exactly where you are coming from, and we've been promised the moon before, but .... there is a big difference here, the savings have already arrived / are already arriving.

The latest EV's can do 500k miles. Electric motors are simple and the drivetrain of an EV has about 20 moving parts v's about 2,000 for an ICE.

The running costs per mile are already about 10% of an ICE, cheaper fuel, lower maintenance, lower wear and tear.

The cost of the taxi driver .... now, that hasn't arrived yet, we don't have autonomous cars yet, but multiple commentators, companies like Tesla, computer developers etc, all suggest this will be within the next 5yrs.

So in this case, the far lower 'taxi' cost has largely arrived, it's just a matter of all the parts coming together, especially the legislative part, over the next 5yrs.

My opinion now, rather than just reporting what Tony says, is that we may as drivers get priced off the road. Autonomous vehicles are expected to reduce accidents by around 95% due to legal/safe driving, better awareness, and simply not doing 'stupid stuff'.

So our insurance may go up. Then someone in America, whose sitting in a CoD will get hit by a car driver, and will sue them on the basis that they put others lives at risk by taking chances (driving yourself not CoD).

OK this sounds a bit silly, but perhaps it's a little like second hand smoking, if your risk taking impacts my health, can I take action against you.

I reckon stage 1 will be 'the youth' using CoD's, then we'll see all but one car in each household disappearing, and then when we have to fork out £10k to £20k for a new car, we'll ponder going carless.

Another interesting point Tony makes is that some disruptions are faster than others. For instance the mobile phone had a disruption (a 'S' curve, slow start, fast middle, then a tapering off) of 20yrs, whilst the smart phone S curve was about 2 years, and Nokia didn't see it coming.

With CoD's we aren't switching to cars, or from cars, we are just changing the type of car we use, so it's more like the smartphone change, than the adoption of the mobile phone (or the change from horses to cars, which was also around 20yrs).

Fun ..... and scary stuff!

Martyn1981

Jackmydad wrote: »

Never mind about where the cars are going to have their batteries charged, I'm wondering what they're going to have their batteries charged with.
Things get a bit tight already sometimes as far as power availability goes. Think of a cold, still, Winter evening. Everyone comes home at 18:00. "Start's their house up" and plugs the car in to charge.
Where's all that 'leccy coming from. Nuclear? Oh hang on we're not too keen on that, so we haven't built as many new ones as we should have. Coal? We shut most of them down. nasty dirty things! Wind? Er no sorry there's not much wind tonight. Solar. Well it is dark now. . .
Oil then! That's it! We'll generate the power needed to charge all the car batteries with oil fired power stations. We'll ignore the fact that's just moving the "carbon bulls. . . sorry, footprint" around shall we?

To say nothing of the infrastructure: switchgear, transformers, cables, which will need upgrading if (when?) there is a mass takeup of EVs.

As far as self driving cars and non-ownership goes, it would be marvellous. But somebody will make themselves disgustingly rich off it by persuading the government that it needs to be done in some convoluted way.

My thoughts:

Firstly if leccy demand goes up, then we can scale up our leccy supply infrastructure (supply & demand?)
For 30m cars driving an average of 8,000 miles at 3miles/kWh we'd need around 80TWh more than the 350TWh (or so) we currently consume.

Secondly we don't really need any more capacity to meet the extra generation. About half would come from savings in refining fuel (about 6.5kWh per gallon) and the other half from the gas plants spare capacity as they currently run at low levels through the night, with 10-15GW spare for around 10hrs. So we could cope today.

Moving from low efficiency petrol/diesel to high efficiency (and cleaner) gas generation would be an instant win. Then we expand PV, wind, tidal, hydro, bio etc, to displace that additional gas generation.

The beauty of this, is that you've increased the leccy demand, so with RE being so cheap now, we rollout more in response to demand, and the gas guys won't lose their business as the movement of transport to electricity will balance out their loss of business to RE. So quite a nice transition.

Over time, with the movement of space heating to leccy too, we'll see the amount of gas generation staying roughly the same*, but the percentage dropping as it's steadily replaced with RE and storage, so we have the backup needed to expand RE.

*But the amount of petrol/diesel and domestic gas reducing.

Only my opinion, but I don't think I've made any false assumptions. The one main problem of this theoretical solution today, is that we wouldn't have the spare capacity to charge cars during the GMT evening peaks (yet), so they'd have to wait till nightime, perhaps this would be managed with punitive evening leccy rates, or generous night rates.


EV's should solve two other problems, the intermittency of renewable generation, and the evening demand peak.

When there's too much generation (typically this will become wind at night or PV 10am to 3pm) then the EV's will mop up the excess as that's when they are most likely to be parked and plugged in.

During the evening peak when demand might rise from say 40GW during the day to 55GW somewhere between 4pm and 8pm, then V2G (vehicle to grid) can use a small amount of leccy from the cars to supplement supply, with the cars charged later on, and some sort of benefit payment made to the car owners. Effectively the EV fleet becomes the countries massive battery back up.

EV's are built to supply 50kW+ and have batts of 40kWh+ so 10m cars just supplying 1kW for 4hrs, would take 10GW off the peak demand, and only require 10% or so of the battery capacity.

V2G found to improve the lifetime of electric vehicle batteries

associated academic paper.

On the possibility of extending the lifetime of lithium-ion batteries through optimal V2G facilitated by a flexible integrated vehicle and smart-grid system

Apodemus

Again, I largely agree with you.

The smart-phone analogy is good but I think, like smart-phones, product development and must-have consumerism will mean a short product life and this will stop EVs getting anywhere close to the 500k range.

I agree that the self-driver will be priced off the road pretty quickly, probably through insurance costs and that the taxi industry will be the first big change. (As an aside, I am sure that autonomous vehicles will be really good news for the elderly in terms of continued mobility into old age).

But what will the knock-on effect be for rural areas? Will the pricing-out of self-drive cars lead to higher costs, increased social isolation and rural depopulation? I struggle to see how it will ever be economical for a town-based autonomous taxi to service remote customers.

Jackmydad

As far as rural "public" transport goes it can't make matters much worse than they are.
Rural Cornwall, we joke that the local bus will take you in to the nearest town on a Tuesday morning, and bring you back the following Thursday afternoon.
As usual I suspect that greed, by both government and industry, will kill any idea of the self driving car being cheap. Once all the manual drivers were (are?) forced off the roads, the tax presently paid by them will have to come from somewhere to fund the schemes for free wooly jumpers for sheep or something equally urgent.
Martyn 1981, I hope you are right about scaling up generation. You make good sense.
Again I have no faith in TPTB making making any sensible decisions, either on their own, or with their usual axe grinding advisers.

Apodemus

Jackmydad wrote: »

As far as rural "public" transport goes it can't make matters much worse than they are.
Rural Cornwall, we joke that the local bus will take you in to the nearest town on a Tuesday morning, and bring you back the following Thursday afternoon.

As you correctly point out, with public transport being a poor option at present, car ownership is an essential in rural areas. But we currently have ownership options that enable this to be more or less affordable (with older vehicles, lower insurance costs and DIY maintenance). However, under the scenario envisaged by Martyn, where autonomous taxis are the norm in urban areas and individual ownership becomes a much more expensive option, there will be an adverse impact on rural communities, potentially making things much worse than at present. (Although admittedly the same risks apply under the "peak oil" scenarios, albeit for very different reasons).

Martyn1981

For rural areas there may still be a possibility. But I admit that I'm totally spitballing here, but ....

.... let's say Tony is right and CoD is 4x cheaper than keeping your car, and 10x cheaper than buying a new car*, then there's a lot of margin in there for a rural CoD service that whilst more expensive than city services could still be cheaper (as cheap?) as owning a car, even if rural rates are 4x more.

It might be that the cars take longer to arrive, as there are less around, and higher fees apply for travelling to you, but it might work. It might not too, I don't have a dog in this fight, just thinking out loud.

*The cost differential does include the land free'd up by not needing a drive/parking space, but if rural I suspect that land has a lower value (again assuming, not sure).

BeenThroughItAll

gzoom wrote: »

The 'affordable' 200 miles range+ EVs are literally around the corner. The next generation Nissan Leaf is due to be shown off this September, and Tesla will be 'delivering' the first Model 3 to US customers in the next 5 days.

200 miles of real life range, sub 6 second 0-60 time, same price as a BMW 320D.

https://jalopnik.com/heres-a-closer-look-at-the-production-tesla-model-3-1797154836

EV rapid charging is also developing very quickly. This is the map of the UK where Tesla have installed/about to install their rapid chargers.



These rapid chargers add range at a stupid rate, 300 miles + in hour, which actually means in a 15-30 minute stop for a toilet/coffee your add 150miles of range or another 2hrs+ of driving. This isn't some kind of future/concept tech either, even in somewhere as normal as Northampton services there are 6 of these chargers. Rumours are the actual chargers can run at 140KW+ so in theory add 200 miles+ range in less than 30 minutes but local gird/current battery tech is the limiting factor.

Which is all absolutely spiffing, unless you live north of say, Leeds, in which case you're pretty stuffed unless you want to spend half of your time travelling to chargers via a circuitous route.

And of course that you want to stop every couple of hours for half an hour at a time.

Car_54

Martyn1981 wrote: »

For rural areas there may still be a possibility. But I admit that I'm totally spitballing here, but ....

.... let's say Tony is right and CoD is 4x cheaper than keeping your car, and 10x cheaper than buying a new car*, then there's a lot of margin in there for a rural CoD service that whilst more expensive than city services could still be cheaper (as cheap?) as owning a car, even if rural rates are 4x more.

It might be that the cars take longer to arrive, as there are less around, and higher fees apply for travelling to you, but it might work. It might not too, I don't have a dog in this fight, just thinking out loud.

*The cost differential does include the land free'd up by not needing a drive/parking space, but if rural I suspect that land has a lower value (again assuming, not sure).

But the land freed up by not having a car in the front garden has zero value, even though it's in London, because it can't be built on. The assumption that a real saving would be achieved there makes me wonder about the rest of the claimed financial analysis.