7 ms·

A Brighter Future for Electric Cars and the Planet

32 points by devy 9y ago

Teknoman117 9y ago
You have to love the people in the comments section there. Few seem to understand that one of the major points of electric cars is decoupling the energy generation and expenditure. Sure, if your country generates all its electricity with coal then of course electric cars aren't going to do anything for you at first. The whole concept is that you reduce the number of sources of pollution so that you have less things that you have to replace in the future.
- cowmix 9y ago
  Even if 101% of your electricity is coal generated, you are head of the game with EVs. My gen-1 Volt travels about 27 miles on the electricity/energy it takes to refine one gallon of gas. Basically, if you stopped refining gas, you could power almost all of the EVs on the road with the same energy.
  - konspence 9y ago
    Does this include the energy in the refined gas itself?
    - cowmix 9y ago
      That is the energy it takes to create the gas (and not the energy to extract and move around). Again, my EV goes the same distance as the average fuel economy for the same amount of energy. ICE double dip.. plus more.
- johngalt 9y ago
  Yes the meme of the "coal powered car". TBF, I wouldn't mind that at all. That means we could be domestically self sufficient with our energy needs. Not to mention it's a lot easier/cheaper to have one big coal plant with one set of emissions controls, rather than thousands of gas engines with controls in various states of maintenance and disrepair. Imagine the converse. If we had electric cars today and were proposing moving to liquid fuels. No one would recommend it. "Hey what if we brought all the pollution closer to us and where our families live. That sounds like a great idea!"
ProfessorLayton 9y ago
I can't wait for electric cars to become more common and competitive with conventional cars. I believe we're going to look back car's emissions the same way we look back at the pre-sewage treatment days - when people used to dump their sewage out the window and into their drinking water! That being said, we haven't reached the EOL for this first generation of electric cars, and figured out what happens next. Will replacement batteries cost a reasonable price? Or will manufacturers use this as an opportunity to try and get you to buy another car? Maybe you'll be able to replace the old battery with a new one from a 3rd party, or maybe you won't because its loaded with DRM. Battery prices may go down for automakers, but perhaps consumers won't see a huge benefit. A replacement battery for my hybrid still runs a few thousand dollars and its only about 1 kilowatt-hour.
- aphextron 9y ago
  >Will replacement batteries cost a reasonable price? Or will manufacturers use this as an opportunity to try and get you to buy another car? The standard for now seems to be a lifetime warranty or similar on battery failure. Hyundai and Chevy have both done this to sell the Ioniq EV and Bolt EV respectively. Whether or not that holds as these cars truly go mainstream is doubtful though.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Small-battery all-electric cars (everything but Bolt/Tesla) have already had a lot of replacement batteries sold, so you could always look at that.
- sokoloff 9y ago
  > A replacement battery for my hybrid still runs a few thousand dollars and its only about 1 kilowatt. kilowatt-hour is the measure of energy storage capacity. kilowatt is a measure of power.
- cowmix 9y ago
  Batteries are almost 100% recyclable. Also, with the Volt at least, zero failures of the battery systems: http://insideevs.com/zero-first-generation-chevrolet-volt-battery-packs-replaced-due-general-capacity-degradation/ http://insideevs.com/zero-first-generation-chevrolet-volt-ba...
acomjean 9y ago
For those of us city dwellers with on-street parking, there doesn't seem to be much talk about getting public infrastructure to charge them. Public charging stations? I'm not sure that will help a lot. It seems like a future for those with suburban homes. I think those in cities don't drive that much, so maybe those car bound people are a better place to start. I guess I can get an eBike at some point.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  There's always at least one person in every electric car thread saying "but it doesn't work for me!" Many city dwellers who own cars don't park on the street, but it really varies by city. There are a few on-street chargers out there, maybe there will be more in the future if people advocate for them.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    On street parking in a biggish city sounds like a nightmare to me anyways. It's really living on the edge of street cleaning, time limits, and so on...
    - bkjelden 9y ago
      There's also the constant threat of break-ins. Forgot to put your sunglasses away? Have fun replacing a window!
- dangrossman 9y ago
  Several cities are doing trials where they install a car charger on each street lamp. They already have power run to them after all.
- tankerdude 9y ago
  Lately, they've been adding them to mall parking structures as well as at hotels and some national parks. It's coming along, but not the best. Personally, I'd like to spoke and hub it with an eBike for the last mile to make my footprint even smaller than with just my Leaf and solar panels. Basically, I want a safe place to park an ebike overnight (or a scooter, or what have you), near light rail. Then take the ebike the last few miles and back from work.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
Until you can go on a road trip in an electric car without a lot of thinking about where and when you'll fuel up they are not going to make headway as primary vehicles. People buy cars in order to have a fast mode of transportation available with good uptime. The prospect of having a hr delay every several hundred miles in the middle of an overnight trip to see a dying relative or in the middle of a cross country vacation is a prospect that will cause many non-urban households to retain fossil fueled powered vehicles for longer than some would like. The HN crowd will buy electric econoboxes and fancy Teslas while they run the SV rat race but when it comes time to raise kids in teh suburbs and really put on the miles the convenience of range and fuel time will cause many people to have at least one in the household fleet.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  For commuters with reasonable commutes of less than an hour each way, EVs make perfect sense. People living in the boonies commuting 2 hours each way...no way. I only use my car occasionally (a tank of gas a month) walking to work instead, so I'm not the ideal target for an EV.
  - tankerdude 9y ago
    What does the boonies mean? I drive 30 miles away from work and it takes me over 1 hour, sometimes up to 2 hours when something horrible has happened. The newest generation, like the Bolt, gets 230 miles. Are you saying you are driving over 100 miles in each direction a day?
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      My dad used to work in grand gulf nuclear station but lived in Vicksburg. 42 minutes each way according to google maps. I thought he was crazy for doing it, but it felt much longer when I was younger. So ya, you could do that with a bolt or tesla. I guess I have to redefine what I mean by boonies.
      - 9y ago
chiefofgxbxl 9y ago
Obviously air pollution is the main thing to tackle here, but even noise pollution is a nice benefit of electrics. When I test-drove the Tesla Model S I was excited for a quiet future. ICE cars simply produce far too much noise. They've disrupted my local downtown area, making it undesirable as the 18-wheelers roar by. If not for the emissions damaging public health, I'm surprised to see municipalities tolerate this scourge of deafening noise. And the death of artificially-loud pickup trucks will receive an ovation from myself.
- pdelbarba 9y ago
  I don't buy the noise argument. Above a certain speed, wind and tire noise far exceed ICE noise. The pickups I've seen are mostly due to the use of course off-road tires that buzz as they go down the road and the motorcycles won't give up their not-super-legal aftermarket exhausts until people collectively agree to stop running them over.
  - csours 9y ago
    I looked this up a while ago, and tire noise accounts for 94% of noise over 60 MPH.
  - wanderr 9y ago
    In a downtown area the speeds are likely not high, and the traffic is likely stop and go, with lots of opportunity for revving engines as drivers jam the accelerator down from a dead stop. My previous apartment had a busy highway on one side, and a busy street with a stop light right before an onramp to said highway. The furious acceleration of cars going from a stop to highway speeds as fast as they can was much worse than the monotonous general highway whooshing sounds.
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      I've heard this called "breakthrough noise", and whenever I'm walking around and hear an obnoxiously loud noise from a vehicle I exclaim, "My Tesla doesn't make that noise!" Fortunately my walking companions generally find that amusing.
Matt3o12_ 9y ago
One of the biggest drawbacks for electric cars is charging. I am not taking about super charging – Tesla has shown that you can go almost anywhere with an electric car. I'm taking about home charging for people who rent apartments and park in the street. For those, charging is a real problem because I do not think it is practical for them to use quick charging all the time. Quick charging is great for road trips. They give you enough power to go for another few hours while you have a break (which you should take anyways after driving for a while). Quick chargers are impractical for home charging for a couple of reasons: 1. They are going to be crowded because people will spend 40min there on average (see SF where a lot of people already do that). 2. It sucks to wait for the car to finish charging. Going to a gas pump is already annoying but charging a car for a extended amount of time is just inconvenient and impractical. Electric cars should really be charged just like mobile phones. When you get home, you plug in the car. When you leave the car is full (or at the desired charging level). This makes electric car superior because you do not have to worry about "is my tank full enough for me to get to work and to the next gas station or am I gonna be late in the office". But until we have that, electric cars are unfortunately infeasible for a lot of people who live in apartments. What we need to do is provide charging and parking solutions for them. They need to be able to park for 17+ without getting into trouble while charging. One way to do that is by providing normal charger at people's work, so that they arrive, plugin and wait until they have finished work and go home. Another interesting solution is to use the power of street lamps. A British startup is already working on that [1]. What we need IMO is to have both. Some people will charge in the streets and some will at work. But until we have that (which might take the longest because it is very expensive to install so many chargers), EVs are going to be impractical for basically anybody who does not have a garage (and incredible useful for those that do). There are also a couple of other ways, though, im not sure how feasible they are in the short term future: increase the speed of quick charging (I don't think it is possible to charge a 70kwh battery in 5min without killing it in the long term) Have the cars charge them autonomously at big charging parks at night. While this is my favorite we have yet to see when this really happens for non luxury cars (the hardware for autonomy could already increase the purchase price by many thousands of dollars and I don't know when all car manufacturers are ready – I sincerely hope Tesla will not be the only car maker to have feasible electric cars because seeing mostly Tesla would be kind of boring and kill competition sooner or later which is always bad for the consumers). [1]: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/london-street-lamps-electric-car-charging-points-ubitricity-tech-firm-hounslow-council-richmond-a7809126.html http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/london-street-lamps...
andys627 9y ago
Or we could build our cities to walk, bike, and ride transit.
- bdamm 9y ago
  Cities are already and will always be hybrid transportation hubs. There will be walkable areas, there will be car-required areas, and a wide range of in between mixes. These serve different markets and attract different citizens. One thing that will not work will be to force a one-type-fits all transportation strategy to all cities or all city areas.
  - andys627 9y ago
    I agree. America has generally forced a one-type-fits all transpo strategy - personal autos. This is causing lots of problems regardless of the fuel source of the car - oil, natural gas, or electricity from the grid or rooftop.
jtlien2 9y ago
One detail usually overlooked with having a fleet of electric cars is the added weight of the battery and the extra wear and tear this will create on our highways. There is a rule of thumb that says that highway damage goes up by the 4th power of the axle weight. So an electric car that is 33% heavier than the an ICE car, will cause (4/3)^4 = 3.16 times as much damage. So if we all go to electric cars and if batteries do not become lighter, then expect road to not last as long. Also, concrete production itself is a serious CO2 source.

32 points by devy 9y ago

You have to love the people in the comments section there. Few seem to understand that one of the major points of electric cars is decoupling the energy generation and expenditure. Sure, if your country generates all its electricity with coal then of course electric cars aren't going to do anything for you at first. The whole concept is that you reduce the number of sources of pollution so that you have less things that you have to replace in the future.

cowmix 9y ago
Even if 101% of your electricity is coal generated, you are head of the game with EVs. My gen-1 Volt travels about 27 miles on the electricity/energy it takes to refine one gallon of gas. Basically, if you stopped refining gas, you could power almost all of the EVs on the road with the same energy.
- konspence 9y ago
  Does this include the energy in the refined gas itself?
  - cowmix 9y ago
    That is the energy it takes to create the gas (and not the energy to extract and move around). Again, my EV goes the same distance as the average fuel economy for the same amount of energy. ICE double dip.. plus more.
johngalt 9y ago
Yes the meme of the "coal powered car". TBF, I wouldn't mind that at all. That means we could be domestically self sufficient with our energy needs. Not to mention it's a lot easier/cheaper to have one big coal plant with one set of emissions controls, rather than thousands of gas engines with controls in various states of maintenance and disrepair. Imagine the converse. If we had electric cars today and were proposing moving to liquid fuels. No one would recommend it. "Hey what if we brought all the pollution closer to us and where our families live. That sounds like a great idea!"

ProfessorLayton 9y ago

I can't wait for electric cars to become more common and competitive with conventional cars. I believe we're going to look back car's emissions the same way we look back at the pre-sewage treatment days - when people used to dump their sewage out the window and into their drinking water! That being said, we haven't reached the EOL for this first generation of electric cars, and figured out what happens next. Will replacement batteries cost a reasonable price? Or will manufacturers use this as an opportunity to try and get you to buy another car? Maybe you'll be able to replace the old battery with a new one from a 3rd party, or maybe you won't because its loaded with DRM. Battery prices may go down for automakers, but perhaps consumers won't see a huge benefit. A replacement battery for my hybrid still runs a few thousand dollars and its only about 1 kilowatt-hour.

aphextron 9y ago
>Will replacement batteries cost a reasonable price? Or will manufacturers use this as an opportunity to try and get you to buy another car? The standard for now seems to be a lifetime warranty or similar on battery failure. Hyundai and Chevy have both done this to sell the Ioniq EV and Bolt EV respectively. Whether or not that holds as these cars truly go mainstream is doubtful though.
greglindahl 9y ago
Small-battery all-electric cars (everything but Bolt/Tesla) have already had a lot of replacement batteries sold, so you could always look at that.
sokoloff 9y ago
> A replacement battery for my hybrid still runs a few thousand dollars and its only about 1 kilowatt. kilowatt-hour is the measure of energy storage capacity. kilowatt is a measure of power.
cowmix 9y ago
Batteries are almost 100% recyclable. Also, with the Volt at least, zero failures of the battery systems: http://insideevs.com/zero-first-generation-chevrolet-volt-battery-packs-replaced-due-general-capacity-degradation/ http://insideevs.com/zero-first-generation-chevrolet-volt-ba...

acomjean 9y ago

For those of us city dwellers with on-street parking, there doesn't seem to be much talk about getting public infrastructure to charge them. Public charging stations? I'm not sure that will help a lot. It seems like a future for those with suburban homes. I think those in cities don't drive that much, so maybe those car bound people are a better place to start. I guess I can get an eBike at some point.

greglindahl 9y ago
There's always at least one person in every electric car thread saying "but it doesn't work for me!" Many city dwellers who own cars don't park on the street, but it really varies by city. There are a few on-street chargers out there, maybe there will be more in the future if people advocate for them.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  On street parking in a biggish city sounds like a nightmare to me anyways. It's really living on the edge of street cleaning, time limits, and so on...
  - bkjelden 9y ago
    There's also the constant threat of break-ins. Forgot to put your sunglasses away? Have fun replacing a window!
dangrossman 9y ago
Several cities are doing trials where they install a car charger on each street lamp. They already have power run to them after all.
tankerdude 9y ago
Lately, they've been adding them to mall parking structures as well as at hotels and some national parks. It's coming along, but not the best. Personally, I'd like to spoke and hub it with an eBike for the last mile to make my footprint even smaller than with just my Leaf and solar panels. Basically, I want a safe place to park an ebike overnight (or a scooter, or what have you), near light rail. Then take the ebike the last few miles and back from work.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

Until you can go on a road trip in an electric car without a lot of thinking about where and when you'll fuel up they are not going to make headway as primary vehicles. People buy cars in order to have a fast mode of transportation available with good uptime. The prospect of having a hr delay every several hundred miles in the middle of an overnight trip to see a dying relative or in the middle of a cross country vacation is a prospect that will cause many non-urban households to retain fossil fueled powered vehicles for longer than some would like. The HN crowd will buy electric econoboxes and fancy Teslas while they run the SV rat race but when it comes time to raise kids in teh suburbs and really put on the miles the convenience of range and fuel time will cause many people to have at least one in the household fleet.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
For commuters with reasonable commutes of less than an hour each way, EVs make perfect sense. People living in the boonies commuting 2 hours each way...no way. I only use my car occasionally (a tank of gas a month) walking to work instead, so I'm not the ideal target for an EV.
- tankerdude 9y ago
  What does the boonies mean? I drive 30 miles away from work and it takes me over 1 hour, sometimes up to 2 hours when something horrible has happened. The newest generation, like the Bolt, gets 230 miles. Are you saying you are driving over 100 miles in each direction a day?
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    My dad used to work in grand gulf nuclear station but lived in Vicksburg. 42 minutes each way according to google maps. I thought he was crazy for doing it, but it felt much longer when I was younger. So ya, you could do that with a bolt or tesla. I guess I have to redefine what I mean by boonies.
    - 9y ago

chiefofgxbxl 9y ago

Obviously air pollution is the main thing to tackle here, but even noise pollution is a nice benefit of electrics. When I test-drove the Tesla Model S I was excited for a quiet future. ICE cars simply produce far too much noise. They've disrupted my local downtown area, making it undesirable as the 18-wheelers roar by. If not for the emissions damaging public health, I'm surprised to see municipalities tolerate this scourge of deafening noise. And the death of artificially-loud pickup trucks will receive an ovation from myself.

pdelbarba 9y ago
I don't buy the noise argument. Above a certain speed, wind and tire noise far exceed ICE noise. The pickups I've seen are mostly due to the use of course off-road tires that buzz as they go down the road and the motorcycles won't give up their not-super-legal aftermarket exhausts until people collectively agree to stop running them over.
- csours 9y ago
  I looked this up a while ago, and tire noise accounts for 94% of noise over 60 MPH.
- wanderr 9y ago
  In a downtown area the speeds are likely not high, and the traffic is likely stop and go, with lots of opportunity for revving engines as drivers jam the accelerator down from a dead stop. My previous apartment had a busy highway on one side, and a busy street with a stop light right before an onramp to said highway. The furious acceleration of cars going from a stop to highway speeds as fast as they can was much worse than the monotonous general highway whooshing sounds.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    I've heard this called "breakthrough noise", and whenever I'm walking around and hear an obnoxiously loud noise from a vehicle I exclaim, "My Tesla doesn't make that noise!" Fortunately my walking companions generally find that amusing.

Matt3o12_ 9y ago

One of the biggest drawbacks for electric cars is charging. I am not taking about super charging – Tesla has shown that you can go almost anywhere with an electric car. I'm taking about home charging for people who rent apartments and park in the street. For those, charging is a real problem because I do not think it is practical for them to use quick charging all the time. Quick charging is great for road trips. They give you enough power to go for another few hours while you have a break (which you should take anyways after driving for a while). Quick chargers are impractical for home charging for a couple of reasons: 1. They are going to be crowded because people will spend 40min there on average (see SF where a lot of people already do that). 2. It sucks to wait for the car to finish charging. Going to a gas pump is already annoying but charging a car for a extended amount of time is just inconvenient and impractical. Electric cars should really be charged just like mobile phones. When you get home, you plug in the car. When you leave the car is full (or at the desired charging level). This makes electric car superior because you do not have to worry about "is my tank full enough for me to get to work and to the next gas station or am I gonna be late in the office". But until we have that, electric cars are unfortunately infeasible for a lot of people who live in apartments. What we need to do is provide charging and parking solutions for them. They need to be able to park for 17+ without getting into trouble while charging. One way to do that is by providing normal charger at people's work, so that they arrive, plugin and wait until they have finished work and go home. Another interesting solution is to use the power of street lamps. A British startup is already working on that [1]. What we need IMO is to have both. Some people will charge in the streets and some will at work. But until we have that (which might take the longest because it is very expensive to install so many chargers), EVs are going to be impractical for basically anybody who does not have a garage (and incredible useful for those that do). There are also a couple of other ways, though, im not sure how feasible they are in the short term future: increase the speed of quick charging (I don't think it is possible to charge a 70kwh battery in 5min without killing it in the long term) Have the cars charge them autonomously at big charging parks at night. While this is my favorite we have yet to see when this really happens for non luxury cars (the hardware for autonomy could already increase the purchase price by many thousands of dollars and I don't know when all car manufacturers are ready – I sincerely hope Tesla will not be the only car maker to have feasible electric cars because seeing mostly Tesla would be kind of boring and kill competition sooner or later which is always bad for the consumers). [1]: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/london-street-lamps-electric-car-charging-points-ubitricity-tech-firm-hounslow-council-richmond-a7809126.html http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/london-street-lamps...

andys627 9y ago

Or we could build our cities to walk, bike, and ride transit.

bdamm 9y ago
Cities are already and will always be hybrid transportation hubs. There will be walkable areas, there will be car-required areas, and a wide range of in between mixes. These serve different markets and attract different citizens. One thing that will not work will be to force a one-type-fits all transportation strategy to all cities or all city areas.
- andys627 9y ago
  I agree. America has generally forced a one-type-fits all transpo strategy - personal autos. This is causing lots of problems regardless of the fuel source of the car - oil, natural gas, or electricity from the grid or rooftop.

jtlien2 9y ago

One detail usually overlooked with having a fleet of electric cars is the added weight of the battery and the extra wear and tear this will create on our highways. There is a rule of thumb that says that highway damage goes up by the 4th power of the axle weight. So an electric car that is 33% heavier than the an ICE car, will cause (4/3)^4 = 3.16 times as much damage. So if we all go to electric cars and if batteries do not become lighter, then expect road to not last as long. Also, concrete production itself is a serious CO2 source.