Automakers Go Electric, Even If Gas Is Cheap
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The trend toward EVs despite low gas prices should be no more baffling than the trend toward smartphones despite low flip-phone prices.
Actually, I'm not so sure about this. It's easy to see the case for "a little more pollution, but far away" over "a little less pollution, constantly hanging over your head".
An electric car has no more than 50 moving parts. For the powertrain, you'd only ever need to swap the battery pack or the electric motor (weighs about 70lbs). Electric vehicles by their nature embody longevity.
> Also are the byproducts of manufacturing an electric worse than an ICE vehicle.
No.
> We need to think about the environment as a whole.
Yes. Electric vehicles are only one part of the mobility equation.
> I'm still convinced electric mass transportation would be better than investing in individual carmakers.
You're going to cover every American suburb with electric mass transit? If so, the cheapest way to do so is with electrified self-driving vehicles.
Wear and fatigue have nothing to do with out brains ability to comprehend the system. But it's usually easier to design reliable machine that is somehow simple. So it appears to layman as if "reliability = low number of moving parts". But it's bit like saying "lots of megahertz makes good computer".
We're also talking about machines that are maintained by human mechanics throughout their lifespans, not Mars rovers. If a machine is simpler in design, it ought to be easier for a mechanic to replace a part, no?
My favorite counter example is car timing belt. Replace it with chain and you add about 200 moving parts, while increasing reliability and maintainability. Now add roller sleeves around the pins of the chain, you doubled the amount of moving parts and again increased the reliability and reduced friction. The thing with chains is that they typically start to make noise long before failure, saving you from complete engine overhaul. Belt might just snap.
(Though for noncritical applications opposite is true. Belt drive requires no lubrication and they are silent and light weight. Id love to replace messy bike chains with belt drive.)
You state this as if it were a dichotomy: that parts only provide features or reliability. That's not true. In many cases, parts exist only because they are essential to a particular design. A fundamentally different design may have fewer parts, better features, and better reliability all at once.
Once you've got parking charging 95% of driving it will be a net time saved(from visiting gas station). On the instance where you'll be driving more than 250mi I haven't yet found the SuperCharger wait times to be an annoyance. There's still a subset that will want fast refuel but I think it's smaller than at first glance.
-Work parking(Leeds cert already has started this)
-Apartments(upscale working to downscale probably)
-Exterior parking.
Even if you don't have a garage there's no reason you can't still plugin where you park at home(or at work) since most chargers are all weather.
There's also a huge incentive to built charging infra at shopping areas as you've got a captive audience(for 20-30 mins). There was a leaked slide deck a while back from some of the SuperCharger contractors showing businesses in the area where SCs installed seeing at 50% boost in revenue.
I'm not saying I think the problem is intractable, just that I think fueling is still a big problem with EVs for most people.
If you have your own garage then you're all set now, obviously.
If you park in a shared garage, it's pretty simple to install a charger there. Garages still have electricity. It could be dedicated for you, or shared with metering. Either way, it's pretty straightforward. What can be hard, depending on who you're dealing with, is convincing the garage owner to let you do this. As EVs become more common, catering to their owners will become more desirable. It's one thing to block installing chargers when one tenant wants one, and quite another when 10% of your tenants want them.
The same story plays out with street parking. In terms of infrastructure it's no big deal, and the main obstacle is political. As EVs become more common, that will go away.
Here almost all of them are metered at 0.24c / kWh(even for chademo) which is about 4x actual electricity rates but much better than that.
This is already natural in cold climates where you can't leave your car at work or outside the apartment without plugging in your engine heater. I'd guess it's common in Alaska or parts of Canada (it is in e.g. North Scandinavia). It's not very expensive infrastructure.
Whenever you live, if you live in America, Europe or Asia, there is already a big electrical infrastructure installed.
This lighting infrastructure goes unused by day or by night by using more efficient lights(LEDs) that need much less energy and could be controlled much better than old technology.
I have an EV so I had to power the office parking of my company. It took a day. Extremely easy.
I'm not sure why ownership matters... Renting a home with a garage works just as well.
I'm also kind of curious why you think a majority of Americans don't have off-street parking? In suburban and rural areas it's standard to have a garage or at least a permanent parking spot. To me it seems like only in the very densest cities that people have to use street parking. And even in the city there are plenty of apartments/condos with dedicated parking.
What kind of neighborhood is representative of what you're imagining? Maybe I'm just not picturing it right.
And the cost is falling with astonishing rapidity: http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/01/chevrolets-bolt-is-an-el.... We may end up in a situation in which electric cars are cheaper and simpler than ICE cars sooner than is commonly supposed.
The scenario I'm sketching obviously isn't guaranteed, but it's gotta be more than 10% likely and probably less than 85% likely. At the very least it's likely enough to scare conventional carmakers.
First month of owning an EV I put ~3k miles on it at ~$40/mo electricity bill increase. Most EVs range from 230-330 Wh/mi, gas for the car it replaced would have been ~$250. If you drive a lot EVs make sense for a bunch of reasons(no oil changes drop the per-mile cost even lower).
Leafs come in around 230 Wh/mi from what I hear which is even better from a cost perspective.
That is my general gripe with modern gadgets - we had something very good with AA, but now everything with li-ion is proprietary and impossible to replace/charge outside.
Did sales of electric cars grow or decrease in 2015 compared to 2014. Answer: http://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/
What about sales of ICEs? http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/202980/us-auto-sales-hit-all...
So if overall car sales are up by EV sales are down, tell me why we are so bullish on EVs?
Why doesn't the fed just use higher taxes on gas to disincentivize gas guzzlers, and let the market take care of the rest?
US gas prices are ridiculously low compared to most of the developed world.
I think a lot of the oddity in regulation (and taxes) is those are fights that were won. It's not exactly sane, but sometimes you have to go with what's achievable over what's right. And then hope the net effect pushes behavior in the direction you wanted.
Pigouvian taxes on high-carbon fuels are ridiculously unpopular. The median voter (http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-Polici...) does not perceive the TCO of cars, the fuel supply chain, and parking spaces (http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/1932...). So CAFE standards and other kinda crappy, second- and third-best workarounds get used instead.
Sure it may eventually change market conditions to favor electric vehicles, but it will be a long time before there are cheap, used electric vehicles for poor people to buy.
Other upside: a lot of gas stations have closed, converted to apartment/condo buildings, which helps to revitalize parts of the city.
Downside: I don't feel like the provincial government has been investing at all in public transport. On the contrary, they're investing in more unsustainable highways to make suburbans happy. 1960s nostalgia.
You Canadians are freaking smart.
Everyone got pissed off, and refuse to pay, but still drive on the highway anyway.
Result: still the same amount of traffic, and now the government is sitting with billions of Rands worth of new debt.
If you are poor, why would you be driving a guzzler like that? Aren't most used US Camrys V6es or at least 2.2-2.4L? I realize if you are poor you might not have much choice, but if I was poor I'd at least aim for an 1.4-1.6L car, even for a full sized model.
If more people made that decision, it would drive up demand and second hand for those cars, meaning it would be more attractive for new car buyers to go for them. For years now it's been the case that manufacturers launch 10 engines in some markets, but in the US they launch with a single guzzler engine option doing 25 mpg or even less.
Sadly so will climate change. The poor will be fucked no matter what.
That said, you could probably mitigate the issue somewhat by providing tax credits for gas for low income people. Generally proponents of the carbon tax want it to be revenue neutral, which means we have an opportunity to return the money to the people in a fair way.
Besides, electric cars have zero road emission. Drivers will not see the exhaust emissions by themselves. Electric cars shifted the emissions to the power plant so drivers will have less feelings about their contribution to global warming.
And there is a clear path to eliminating the remaining emissions, unlike in an internal combustion vehicle.
Even the filthiest conventional power plants are significantly more efficient than the internal combustion engine and emit fewer greenhouse gasses.
Aside from that, the electric grid is becoming cleaner by the month which means EVs automatically become cleaner as we transition to renewables and clean generation. Gasoline engines never become cleaner.
That's the main sustainability argument for EVs: de-coupling transportation from oil or any particular fuel, thereby enabling a clear path as the grid continues to transition to renewables.
We have ever increasing crashworthiness requirements, which make cars heavier, which increases car weight. We have a ratcheting fuel efficiency mandate. The convergence of these two pushes for lighter, more crashworthy cars, which means expensive materials. Electric cars may be price competitive very soon as prices for batteries fall, and as prices for gasoline cars increase.
However, these regulations, while well meaning, will be counter-productive. People simply can't afford new cars anymore and are driving old cars much longer. We have a lot of 1990's engines out there in fairly reliable cars, and these emit far more pollution than a modern car, nevermind the fuel efficiency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_t...
Having the government pick winners is a losing proposition. The correct solution is to properly price the externalities of ICEs, then let the market sort it out.
Tesla does not use rare earth metals in our battery or motor. Typically, rare earth metals apply to DC motors, which use magnets. One of the reasons we use an AC induction motor is it does not require magnets, which often contain the rare earth metals.
https://my.teslamotors.com/de_AT/forum/forums/no-rare-earth-...
In a way this is understandable since road tax comes from gasoline sale and electric vehicles don't require gas. However I wonder how they will treat something like Chevy Volt that can run on both electricity and gas.
[1] http://www.govtech.com/state/Georgia-Slams-Brakes-on-Electri...
I'm not exactly a fan of fracking and tar sand extraction, but it is quite an achievement.
The real opportunity here isn't for the automakers, it is for the Congress to change the law with regards to fuel taxes so as to set a floor price on fuel to encourage the shift to more economical vehicles; not necessarily full ev. A tax system could be set to provide a floor and a ceiling - meaning if the product price got to high the tax would decrease a bit to compensate
Still, what did you expect from the big companies in the face of the fleet mileage requirements? You cannot do that without at least hybridization. Finally, with GM, did anyone really expect them to cede the everyday car buyer market when it came to electrics. GM even has the production capacity to make the cars when people want them
Hybrids trade pump prices for cost of additional (non-oil-based) components. That's going to be a better trade when pump prices are high. It's more contingent.
So... low oil prices could mean we should see more electrics, but fewer hybrids.
[0] Should, hasn't yet, I don't know why. So far lower oil costs are reflected in transportation fuel, but not in household electricity costs.[1] Maybe because the grid just takes a really long time to shift its energy portfolio? Maybe I'm just completely wrong...
[1] http://www.eia.gov/pressroom/presentations/sieminski_0226201... : slide 11.
[2] Yes, embedded footnotes. And unreferenced footnotes. Madness.
In 2014, petroleum only accounted for 1% of US electricity generation, so the price of oil isn't likely to have much of an effect on the price of electricity:
That is to say, if 2015 were the last year anyone could buy a gasoline-fueled car, we'd be looking at 2027 for that last batch to age out.
[0]http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-ihs-average-c...
it's invite only, though.
It's quite technical, but the content is good.