Electric cars

Martyn1981

AdrianC wrote: »

It's that easy, is it...?

Yes.

AdrianC wrote: »

So the basic laws of supply and demand go along with various basic laws of physics as "not applicable because they're inconvenient"?

I assume* the very first lesson in an O'level Economics class, would have been on supply and demand. This lesson would explain that when demand rises, and supply is limited, the price will rise.

However that same lesson would explain that when demand rises and supply rises to meet it, price doesn't rise. In fact, the price of a good typically falls when the marketplace gets bigger.

*Having never attended an O'level Economics class, though I do have one (an Economics O'level that is).

gzoom

AdrianC wrote: »

Surely the main question is the timescale of "the future"?

Surely you must be getting bored of the same pointless arguments going on in this thread in a never ending circle .

All I can say is I've been driving EVs for the last 3 years, in the last 12 months our EV has done 15K and the combustion car 5K.

In the next 18 months or so we'll be going to swapping the combustion car to go fully electric.....

So whilst your still spouting the same rubbish about how EVs are just not going work, in the real world I'll keep on enjoying driving EVs :rotfl:

AnotherJoe

Pennywise wrote: »

But how does that work when the price of electricity rises due to demand from millions of electric cars - someone has to pay for new power stations to be built and the national grid to be beefed up and for new charging stations etc.

Very old misconception. No new power stations need be built. If you don't beleive me the National Grid has said so. Only minor local upgrades are needed and that can come in gradually over the next ten to fifteen years. Charging stations are paid for by manufacturers or by companies looking to make money, for example Shell are starting to roll out chargers at their petrol stations and BP appear to be following suit.

Pennywise wrote: »

How will the loss of fuel duty, road tax and VAT be made up? Presumably there'll have to be hefty new taxes on electric cars instead?
.

Well some of the money will come from lower NHS bills as we stop poisoning people.
Others may come from extra taxes on various things perhaps higher taxes on petrol and diesel cars to reflect the actual damage they cause to health every day.
Others may indeed come from increased taxes on electric cars.

Pennywise wrote: »

What happens when government subsidies are withdrawn?

People will by then be pretty much only buying electric cars as by that point they will be cheaper
both to buy and run than ICE cars. And FWIW we are looking no more than the end if the next decade, eg 2030. When you can do 300 miles in an electic car at 20% the cost why would you buy anything else ?

Pennywise wrote: »

Considering that the roll out of digital radio and turning off analogue radio has been delayed time and time again and now seems to be kicked into the long grass, I don't think we'll be seeing the majority of cars being electric any time soon. If something "simple" and relatively cheap like digital radio conversion couldn't be achieved, there's little hope for electric cars for a generation or two.

That is by far the most ridiculous analogy I've ever read , ever, anywhere.

AnotherJoe

uknick wrote: »

But, everybody seems to talk about using carbon based power station generated electricity to charge cars, and no mention is made of hydrogen to power the cars.

Thats because its now dead in the water. The time to do that was 10 to 20 years ago but the complacent oil auto industries preferred to run their cosy cartels. Then Lithium Ion batteries came along, made electric cars possible and the two advantages that H2 cars potentially have, range and charge speed are rapidly becoming eroded to the point of irrelevance.

Most manufacturers have cancelled their H2 car plans, really only Toyota are hanging on and even they have said they will be producing electric cars by 2022 when the next gen batteries come along, because at that point they will be comparable to H2. Which is shooting themselves in the H2 foot in that case since they wont need H2 cars and why would you buy one using a fuel thats the same cost as petrol when you can fill up at home with electricity for 20% the cost??
Plus the writings on the financial wall, there have been many recent announcements about literally tens of billions of dollars worth of investment in electric cars and batteries by most major manufacturers, and nothing at all on H2. They tried it for a while as a delaying tactic, eg "dont buy an electric car because H2 is coming and you'll be left with a dead end" but its clear that now applies to H2. Its time has been and gone.

uknick wrote: »

I know there are only a few, and costly, models on the road at present and the hydrogen fuel network is pretty limited, but one would have thought this fuel would remove the dependency on the national grid for power.

Why would you want to do that? At the moment for example we are actually in a position where some energy suppliers are paid NOT to produce electricity because it cant be used at low peak times, eg middle of the night. Cars can soak that up and create a win win solution, drive using the very lowest cost fuel without any need for additional anything.

uknick wrote: »

It would also give the oil companies something to aim toward by converting their petrol station network over time into hydrogen fuel networks.

The cost of rolling out a hydrogen infrastructure equivalent to petrol has been estimated at a trillion US dollars. It's simply not going to happen because who would finance that ?

Certainly not the people who dont like subsidies to support electric cars !! This would make those look like chicken feed.

Clearly not oil companies when they wont make any more money than on petrol, which isnt much, they mostly make their money selling coffee and the like to people filling up. Which is why electric chargers are starting to look interesting to them since people charging cars will be waiting longer than someone filling up with petrol and ths more likely to buy, plus they alreday have the infrastructure.

Plus its far cheaper and easier to install a few chargers than a whole infrastructure of H2 storage and refrigeration.

Talking of which H2 has to solve the chicken egg problem of why rollout H2 stations when there aren't any cars and why build cars (which incidentally are far more complex and costly to build than battery only electric vehicles ) if there's nowhere to fuel them. A very difficult issue if the chicken and the egg are run by different companies and industries.

Electric vehicles could get over this same problem because you can at least charge those at home (up til now since early adopters by and large won't be people who can't).

uknick wrote: »

I know it takes power to generate hydrogen, but is it any more than converting oil to petrol, diesel and electricity?

Yes. You need at least 3x what you need to produce electricity (so thats not great for CO2) and it could easily be much higher depending whose figures you believe). Even if you only make H2 from renewables like solar and wind, its still 3x. So you could power 3x as many cars from the same solar array or wind turbine, as you could H2 cars. Or, you'd need 3x as many wind turbines and solar arrays. Or we'd just keep burning oil. None of those sound like a plan to me.

This is aside, H2 storage tanks cant be below ground like petrol tanks, they need to be above. Imagine what a juicy target that would make for anyone looking for something to go "boom". In contrast petrol is actually not very flammable especially when in a tank. OTOH, H2 at 10,000 PSI, above ground, very juicy target.

ElefantEd

gzoom wrote: »

Surely you must be getting bored of the same pointless arguments going on in this thread in a never ending circle .

All I can say is I've been driving EVs for the last 3 years, in the last 12 months our EV has done 15K and the combustion car 5K.

In the next 18 months or so we'll be going to swapping the combustion car to go fully electric.....

Pretty much the same here, except that our EV has done 94k and our ICE car about 10k in the same period (3.5 years). And the next car we get will be an EV with a bigger range to replace the ICE. Experience has shown us that it would be perfectly practical.

AnotherJoe

ElefantEd wrote: »

Pretty much the same here, except that our EV has done 94k and our ICE car about 10k in the same period (3.5 years). And the next car we get will be an EV with a bigger range to replace the ICE. Experience has shown us that it would be perfectly practical.

Ditto. I have a EV for day to day and an ICE for edge cases which is about once a month and if it wasnt for the fact we occasionally need 2 cars we'd just have one EV and rent ICE now, but what we'll do is in 2 years go to just one EV with 250 miles range. Could do that now but don't fancy shelling out for a Tesla plus they are just too big. 12 - 24 months time there will be Ford, VW, Hyundai, Kia, Nissan models at much more affordable pricing with 250 miles.

And FWIW five years after that all those cars will cost less to buy without subsidy than their ICE equivalents and cost probably 1/4 to run (estimates on latest current EVs already shows them at 1/2 running costs of ICE). And when that happens whose going to buy ICE?

Martyn1981

AnotherJoe wrote: »

And FWIW five years after that all those cars will cost less to buy without subsidy than their ICE equivalents and cost probably 1/4 to run (estimates on latest current EVs already shows them at 1/2 running costs of ICE). And when that happens whose going to buy ICE?

Morning Joe! (Sorry, I watch too much MSNBC to keep up with Trump's antics).

Something that's dawned on me regarding the EV subsidies, is that EV costs have probably fallen almost as much as the subsidies. So if demand remains strong, then the subsidies steady removal might not impact EV sales at all, far sooner than we might think.

I seem to recall that Tesla dropped the price of their S & X models by about $5k last year to reflect falling battery costs. And as discussed on here, the newer Leaf with a larger battery is cheaper than the outgoing one.

So whilst subsidies are clearly important still, the life time running costs of an EV (v's ICE) may already be close to negating their need, so certainly not a long term hurdle to EV rollout.

Martyn1981

AnotherJoe wrote: »

Yes. You need at least 3x what you need to produce electricity (so thats not great for CO2) and it could easily be much higher depending whose figures you believe). Even if you only make H2 from renewables like solar and wind, its still 3x. So you could power 3x as many cars from the same solar array or wind turbine, as you could H2 cars. Or, you'd need 3x as many wind turbines and solar arrays. Or we'd just keep burning oil. None of those sound like a plan to me.

To back that up, it might be worth looking at a better use of H2, and that's for commercial vehicles.

One of the most promising is perhaps the Nikola one semi truck. Which sounds like a great option. But when you look closer it's not necessarily a BEV killer (or BEV only killer, since hydrogen vehicles are BEV's too).

The N1 is hydrogen powered, but will of course have a fully electric drivetrain powered from batteries, but the batteries will be topped up from the H2 fuel cell (a la range extender).

The N1 will have 320kWh of batts on board (the Tesla 300 mile semi will have 600kWh).

The N1 will weigh approx 2,000lbs less than a conventional semi, good news.

But, earlier on this thread we were told by a trucker 'who had done the maths' that a 300 mile battery truck's batts alone would weigh more than a conventional tractor (semi). However, at approx 10lbs per kWh, and after stripping out the hydrogen elements of the N1 drivetrain, that suggests that a 600kWh tractor would weigh the same as an ICE tractor.

Apologies for all the numbers, and for vomiting out lots of mental thoughts, but as far as I can see, even in a roll where H2 has advantages, it's still not convincingly 'pulling ahead' of the BEV only option.

Perhaps H2 vehicles are a good way to use H2 produced from P2G (power to gas) storage making use of excess renewable generation, but I can't help thinking that simply reversing the process on site via large scale fuel cells to support the grid during peak demand, or low generation periods, is a far better use of that H2 than distributing it piece meal all over the country, when we already have a leccy grid that can do that.

NigeWick

Car_54 wrote: »

Surely the future cost of ownership remains unknown, until the government decides how to replace its lost VED (plus VAT) revenue?

EVs will be cheaper to buy due to the cost of batteries coming down. Government will of course tax ownership in some way as they need money to support the nuclear and fossil fuel industries. I suspect they'll use technology to charge for miles driven, as well as collecting VAT on the original purchase.

NigeWick

AdrianC wrote: »

Road pricing is the most likely scheme, but that requires massive infrastructure implementation, and carries big privacy implications.

I think you're wrong there as new vehicles will be "connected" and HMGov Plc will want access to mileage information for taxation purposes. They'll ignore any privacy implications, the same as Google and friends collect data on interweb users now.